


Glow

by luninosity



Category: Actor RPF, Marvel Cinematic Universe RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Medieval, Fae & Fairies, Falling In Love, First Meetings, Folklore, Happy Ending, M/M, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-05
Updated: 2014-06-05
Packaged: 2018-02-03 13:53:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1747022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Don’t leave the path, runs the warning, or the fairies will take you. And sometimes they do. (Or: how tired mercenary Chris Evans fell in love with a fairy-person, who loved him in return.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Glow

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Сияние](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3282860) by [superstition](https://archiveofourown.org/users/superstition/pseuds/superstition)



> As ever, only doing this for fun, no harm intended! Title courtesy of Ludo’s “Streetlights,” just ’cause I like it and it seemed to fit the mood.
> 
> The _iele_ are Romanian forest-spirits mainly known for playing haunting music and seducing humans, particularly handsome young men. (They’re more traditionally female, but oh well…*handwave*) They’re not inherently malicious, but they might accidentally keep you for a hundred years, or you might dance yourself into exhaustion or insanity to the sound of their music.
> 
>  _Iele_ simply means They, or They Themselves, in sort of the same way Celtic fairies are sometimes just called the Fair Folk—knowing and using the true name of anything magical is tricky, as you might inadvertently summon that fairy, though you might also have a certain amount of power over it.
> 
> This is important.

Mud. Mud and rain. Mud and rain and tree roots, Chris amended, having just stumbled over the fifth one in as many minutes. No decent roads.   
  
Of course there were no decent roads. Too much fighting. Too few men left to care about smooth tracks for village cart-wheels.   
  
He put one foot in front of the other, in the rain.    
  
He’d liked the country, briefly. Country was a misnomer, of course. The present fourteenth century had split the region into brittle pieces. Wars of independence. Transylvania, Wallachia, Moldavia, so many others. Splintering apart.   
  
He did believe in every man’s right to independence. Why, more or less, he was here. Why he’d _been_ there.   
  
The rain, unhelpfully, slid down the back of his neck and found a home between his skin and his surcoat, under his armor. He sighed.    
  
Maybe he should just stop walking. Maybe he should sit down here, on a fallen tree in the green-grey haze of forest, and never move again.    
  
The faces came up again, and haunted him. Friends. Fallen. Flames.   
  
He’d signed on as a mercenary, a soldier. He wasn’t a bad fighter, and he could send most of his pay back home to his mother and his sister and his brother, to the cozy crumbling inn. And he’d wanted to help. Of the causes in the world, getting a poor region out from under the crushing thumb of the Ottoman Empire had to be a good one, he’d thought.   
  
The rain turned into a full-blown storm, at that. Thunder and all. “Right,” Chris muttered, “thanks,” and tried to wipe some of it off his face, an endeavor doomed to absolute failure.   
  
One foot in front of the other. Enough feet, and he could find a coast and a ship and a way home. And maybe in the firelight the faces of the dead would go away. The exhaustion, he thought, never would. Lead in his bones.   
  
He hadn’t even gotten fully paid. He understood why. He’d known when he’d left.   
  
The rain let up just a bit, in sympathy.    
  
The forest he was currently navigating had ancient history. Stories, the peasant family who’d fed him that morning had murmured. Fairies. Changelings. Strange beasts and outlaws and wolf’s-heads. Men who’d gone out hunting and never returned, or returned seventy years too late and speaking in an idiom of years gone by. Warnings: stay on the road, don’t speak to strangers, eat nothing. The _iele_ will smile and take your hand.   
  
Chris knew enough scattered Romanian to know that _iele_ simply meant _they_. Themselves. He’d asked. Had gotten only headshakes. Unnamed.   
  
The little girl had said, very gravely: _dracul_. And had given him a shiny stone, a pebble polished by time, in case the dragon might take that instead of him.   
  
Chris smiled, just a little, remembering; and ran fingers over the stone, in his pocket. Dragons. Fairies. Legends. But the weight was real, and comforting.   
  
More steps. More rain. And—   
  
—music?   
  
He paused. Surely no minstrel troupe would be mad enough to set up on a deserted forest track mid-storm. But there it was. Music. Winding through the raindrops and tree-trunks, ghostly and ethereal and omnipresent as sorrow and mirth.    
  
He turned, trying to see through the grey-green mist. The music stretched out coy fingertips and trailed invitation along his skin. He felt the hairs rise along his arm.   
  
He said, a weary impulse, drawn by that line of grief like gold under the tune, “Can I help?”   
  
The music hesitated. So did the mist, drawing back a fraction. Chris raised eyebrows. “Did you do that, or was it coincidence, then?”   
  
“I would love to take the credit, but in fact the latter.” The voice materialized out of nowhere, wry and otherworldly and amused. “Can you _help?”_   
  
“You sounded sad.” He was still searching. No good source. “So I’m guessing you can’t do anything about this storm.”   
  
“I…can try asking the closest _su iyeshi_ …I am not a water spirit.” This time the voice sounded closer and rather bemused; Chris spun around to find the single most beautiful creature he’d ever seen, leaning against a mossy tree-trunk, arms crossed, an antique bone flute dangling startled from one graceful hand.   
  
Chris forgot words. The man—man? fairy? fairy, had to be, with that elemental liquid grace, with the evident ability to befriend the fog—was…   
  
Was magical. No other term for those wide lapis-lazuli eyes, that curving mouth, sinful and inhuman. Those endless legs, just a touch too elegant and elongated to be mortal, poised there in careless harmony with the trees. A fantasy come to life. Bewitching. And Chris was bewitched.   
  
He took a step forward. And tripped over _another_ tree root. The armor, waterlogged, tugged him down.   
  
But he ended up not falling. Unnaturally strong slim fingers caught his shoulder. Kept him upright. “Honestly, it’s hardly going to be worth abducting you if you pass out on your feet. Sit down.”   
  
“I—abducting? Oh, thanks…” He gave in and let the hands push him onto a damp log. Dimly, he registered the fact that he’d left the path. Not far—he could stretch out a boot-toe and tap man-made wheel-ruts—but incontrovertibly.    
  
“Here.”   
  
Chris looked at the wine-skin. And the fairy-hand holding it. “Um.”   
  
“Oh, _pula mea,_ really…I’m hardly going to poison you after I’ve just rescued you from the clutches of the ground. Drink it. And don’t move for a moment.”   
  
“Um,” Chris said again, intelligently, and took the wine-skin. His fairy-person vanished for a pair of heartbeats—and vanished was the right word, simply melting away between one tree and the next—and then returned. “Food. When was the last time you ate? And don’t look at me like that. This came from a tavern two miles ahead.”   
  
“You…stole food for me?”   
  
“I doubt you can live on moonlight and wine. And I did pay. Was one gold noble sufficient, do you think? I could’ve left two.”   
  
Chris tried to inhale bread, coughed, and managed, “You might’ve just bought the entire tavern…”   
  
“Oh.” Water-sapphire eyes considered this for a second or two, then visibly shrugged, setting the thought aside. “Would you like the gold, then? I have more.”   
  
“You’re…offering me…money?”   
  
“It’s not as if I use it. Better?”   
  
“I think so.” His head was spinning, though that was more to do with the situation and less about tiredness and hunger, at this point. “Go back to the part where you said abduction.”   
  
“Was that not clear? You belong to me, now.”   
  
“Sorry,” Chris said, and put the wine-skin down, very firmly. His lips tingled. Wild blueberries and dandelion ice. “I have people to go home to.”   
  
“People.”   
  
“Family. My mother. Don’t you have a mother? Or an acorn you hatched out of or something?”   
  
“Folklore has rather a lot to answer for. I can make you stay.”   
  
“Yeah,” Chris agreed, watching the bone flute, watching slender fingers. “You could.”   
  
The limpid lakewaters of those eyes changed. Annoyance; but interest, too, Chris thought, hiding in the depths. “Stay.”   
  
“I stopped following orders when I walked out on my company captain, thanks.”   
  
“Ah. Hunedoara. Yes.” The fairy-person sighed, too. And actually sat down on the grass, tucking infinite legs under him like a newborn foal. “I did hear.”   
  
They’d been told to burn the town. To bar the gates, more specifically, and _then_ burn the town. Harboring enemy soldiers. Punishment.    
  
Chris had refused. Had walked away. And the town had burned.   
  
“If it makes you feel any better, we saved some.”   
  
“…you what?”   
  
“Not everyone. Not enough. But people who would listen, who followed us, myself and the _strigoi_ and the _zâne—_ proper fairies, I mean, the flittery dancing well-intentioned ones—and  the _căpcăun_ …ogres, you’d say, I think…I did talk them out of eating one or two of the elderly as payment for the assistance…” A casual wave of one hand, as if the salvation of lives were simply a day’s work. “The music’s good for that. They’re around, someplace. The people. In the woods. I can’t—we can’t give them back themselves. If you follow the fairy music, you end up changed…but they’re alive. _Asa ca merge._ So it goes.”   
  
Chris swallowed. Thought: he’s not human, he’s not human, he’s beautiful and he doesn’t think like you do and he caught you when you fell and _stop staring at his mouth_ …   
  
“Am I changed? If I followed you.”   
  
“To be fair, you practically fell over on top of me. And…aren’t you?” Blue eyes watched him; a sinuous motion brought the fairy-person closer to Chris’s legs, kneeling on the grass while Chris sat on his log and tried not to too obviously clutch at soggy oak. “You listened to me play. You drank fairy wine. And you look as if you feel…lighter, now.”   
  
“You saved people.”   
  
“I did. I wonder whether they would have said yes, though…never going home again…not remembering their cares, their loves…”   
  
“You were sad,” Chris said, and put a hand out to touch his shoulder; the pale eyes came back from memory, startled and wordless. “Did that…were you human? Once?”   
  
“Not that I can recall. Which of course means nothing…you said you had a mother. Will she miss you?”   
  
“Yes.” The word ached in his throat. Fresh-baked bread and brown ale and his brother leaning in the doorway, grinning. His sister singing her heart out, training to be a bard. His mother opening the inn’s doors to everyone, stranger and friend. “Yes.”   
  
“Stay.”   
  
“I _can’t_ —”   
  
“For an hour. Two. No more.”   
  
“Oh,” Chris said, and their eyes met. “Yes.”   
  
The fairy took his hand. Pulled him into the trees.    
  
The afternoon shimmered. Silver and emerald. Wood-bark and the cool whisper of water and grass. Chris dropped cloak and armor in a clumsy leather-and-metal pile and winced at the noise; pale turquoise eyes came over, though, entertained and unoffended, and hands slid beneath his surcoat and shirt, tugging at fabric. “So many layers. How do you ever put up with all this. Does that untie?”   
  
“Yes. We can’t all walk around barefoot in the dew, y’know.” He put out a hand, stroked dark hair back behind a faintly pointed ear. His fairy-person looked up, surprised but happy; Chris did it again, fingers lingering, and got the smile. “I like that. Being touched.”   
  
“I can tell. I like touching you.”   
  
This earned a breathless laugh, but the hands paused, expressively so, lying like an oath of fealty over patched linen. A magical being, Chris thought, pulled out of moonbeams and starshine; acting as his squire, kneeling to tug off his worn boots, by choice. He said, “Come here,” and the magical being did, flowing like quicksilver back to his feet and into Chris’s welcoming hands.    
  
The kiss tasted like music. Like tumbling notes of ecstasy. Like glittering arias and soaring extended heights. Like rain, and dandelion stems.   
  
Time turned to mercury, pooling and swirling. Soft skin sprinkled with raindrop diamonds. Kisses along Chris’s thighs, gently exploring. That mouth, wrapped around him, taking him in. He plunged hands into dark hair, shuddering—too good, impossibly good, a dream—and came, all at once, gasping. He tried to apologize—too fast, too sudden, too mortified—but his fairy-person was licking him, tongue cleaning up every drop of orgasm, and Chris could only lie there and make helpless sounds of pleasure under the ceaseless ministrations.   
  
Some kind of charm, some kind of spell; he felt himself hardening again, lazy stirrings, but he wanted to reciprocate, wanted to see that gaze equally clouded by bliss, so he used his best mercenary’s moves to flip lean muscles and jewel-hued eyes over into the grass, where they lay and sparkled at him. “You want to be inside me, this time? I can—”   
  
“Yes. So much yes. But not yet.”   
  
“What—oh. _Oh_.”   
  
Oh, indeed. Chris wasn’t as skillful as his partner evidently was, but he’d had some practice. And he’d always been good at this. He took a breath, grinned, and bent back down. All the way.    
  
This prompted a gasp and inarticulate words in some not at all decipherable language, and then, “Please—”   
  
“Good?”   
  
“ _Incredible_ —”   
  
“Coming from a fairy-creature, even,” Chris said, and went back to doing that. Enjoyed the broken little pants and squirms of need beneath him, in the grass. His fairy-person tasted sweet, like wild honey, like berries, like some indefinable unknowable other element, mystical and mysterious, and he wanted more. He wanted it all.    
  
He found a rhythm. Kept it up. Snuck a hand beneath the curves of that absolutely enticing backside, and held them both in place, and stroked his tongue just _there_.   
  
A soft tiny scream. And rigid muscles. And _his_ fairy-person was coming, drawn-out pulses of heat, still intoxicatingly sweet as Chris swallowed him down.   
  
He sat up, and contemplated the result with satisfaction: quivering euphoric breaths, acres of fair skin sprawled dazedly in the center of the clearing, grass tangled in disheveled hair, slowly blinking enormous eyes. “Incredible, you said?”   
  
“ _Da…magnific_ …marvelous…”   
  
“Good, then.”   
  
“Come here _right now_.”   
  
“You and orders,” Chris sighed, and pounced. Long legs wrapped around his waist; hands trailed fire along his back. Chris pressed kisses into the line of his throat, the thin skin over his collarbone; this earned an abandoned moan and an arch of hips into his. “That…you feel…”   
  
“You like the beard?” He made sure to turn the next kiss into a lingering filthy affair, the rough scrape of bristles over delicate skin, a nip of teeth. Pink marks, dark ones, kiss-bruises; they’d stain that alabaster skin for weeks. His.   
  
“Yes—” Practically begging. Eyes huge and blue-black with desire. Brilliant color amid the mystic green and grey. “Yes, yes—”   
  
“Do you—I mean, do we have—you need—I’m not going to hurt you, am I—”   
  
“Oh—” Laughter in all the blue; echoed in Chris’s heart, gazing down at those eyes. “I didn’t even think—ah, let me up, one moment—”   
  
Chris would’ve sworn there hadn’t been pockets in the soft billowing shirt and tight trousers the fairy’d been wearing, but after a second of searching a tiny pot came flying at his head. “Here.”   
  
“Peppermint?”   
  
“And comfrey, and witch hazel, and parsley. It’s meant to be healing salve. For bruises, soreness, that sort of thing. It may tingle.”   
  
“I can live with that.” He stuck an experimental finger in. It did indeed tingle. “You get bruises?”   
  
“I trip over tree roots as often as the next person. Unless the next person’s you. In which case not even close. Are you awaiting orders?”   
  
Chris thought about possible answers, put a hand around the closest flyaway elfin wrist, pinned it to the excited grass, and said, “Definitely not.”   
  
“Oh.” Dancing eyes regarded this arrangement, then swept up to meet his. “Yes.”   
  
“Right, then,” Chris said, and bent down to kiss him, with the chill of peppermint floating through the air.    
  
The afternoon faded and blurred. Timeless. Moments hanging like amber, like jewels on a priceless chain, strung together and radiant. The brightness in blue eyes as Chris moved inside him. The soundless parting of lips. The way they fit together, came together, rocked into each other. Chris’s hand in dark hair, cushioning it against the ground. The scents of mint and herbs and crushed grass. The prickle of curious raindrops, returning to speckle Chris’s back and hips with encouragement. The way they both laughed, and the way Chris rolled them over and sat up and pulled _his_ person down into his lap, and they groaned simultaneously at the depth of the thrust.   
  
After, he dozed, lying on his side with long limbs firmly tucked in against him. Spoons in a drawer. His nose in tangled dark hair, his fingers entwined with slim strong ones.   
  
He woke alone, refreshed as if he’d slept for a year, armor neatly polished and stacked beside his boots. There was a basket beside his boots as well.    
  
The rain had ended. The sun was venturing out, but tentatively so.   
  
He sat there without moving for a while. His lips held the memory of fairy-tale sweetness.   
  
He got up, naked under the bashful sunlight, and walked over to his clothing.   
  
The basket proved to contain bread and cheese and a tidy stack of quite old coins, gold and silver and a few scattered bronze and iron. Some had the seals of long-dead kings and emperors. Some were unmarked, or if they’d had marks the signs had been worn away by time.   
  
He got dressed, and ate, and said, very quietly, in case anyone might be listening, “Thank you,” and he wanted to cry, and he wanted to be glad he’d had even this much, one enchanted day, one chance to see blue eyes smile.   
  
He put a hand in his pocket, and found the smooth polished grey stone, and took it out, and looked at the rippled surface. A gift, it’d been. From one human to another. No inherent magical powers, except for that one.   
  
He set it on the grass, and said to the listening silence, “A little girl told me it was good for protection. From dragons. From…bruises, maybe.”   
  
He walked back to the path—the wheel-ruts remained the same; plainly he’d only been gone a matter of hours, not years or decades—and, after some indeterminate amount of time, found himself whistling. One of his mother’s silly childhood songs. Something about not being shy. About kissing a girl. About taking a chance, and hoping for a happy ending.   
  
Leaves rustled, stirred by sunlight. On his left.    
  
A familiar voice said, thoughtfully, “Teach me that one.”   
  
Chris stopped walking. The sunlight held its breath.   
  
“Apparently I like being around you.” Leaning on a different tree. Half in shadow, half in sun, but smiling, slanted and true. Long fingers playing with the pebble, tossing it up and catching it again.  “Somewhat inconvenient, that.”   
  
“Was that an order,” Chris said, “do you ever ask for things like a normal person, _teach me that,_ honestly…” and held out both hands, and his fairy-person stopped lounging against the tree-trunk and came over and took them. The world glowed.   
  
“You sounded happy.”   
  
“I am.”   
  
“Yes…I was not. Without you. So I found you.”   
  
“So you found me.” He put both arms around slender shoulders. They leaned into his touch, trustingly. “And you’re going to, what, follow me home?”   
  
“If you wouldn’t mind. I thought of something. While you were sleeping. I had to go away and think about it for a while. I wanted to tell you.”   
  
“Anything. And I don’t mind, of course not, my mother will adore you. My sister will make you teach her how to play that flute. My brother will try to sleep with you, but he tries to sleep with everything that moves. Are you sure you want to do this? I mean…” He lifted a hand, deliberately brushed wayward hair behind that unearthly slightly pointed ear. The unspoken question. They weren’t out of the woods. Not yet.   
  
“I am sleeping with only you. Unless your brother is irresistibly attractive. Which is a joke. In case you couldn’t tell.”   
  
“We may have to introduce you to human humor.”   
  
“Hmm. I shall take you to meet a _balaur_ , then. I believe there’s one nearby; one of its seven heads ought to know at least one joke. I wanted to tell you…I think I had a name. Or I remembered a name. In my head. Singular. For all I know it isn’t mine, that name, but it might’ve been.”   
  
“Tell me,” Chris said, hand playing with his hair, settling on the back of his neck, holding on. “If you want to.”   
  
“In my head…it was Sebastian.” Blue eyes found his, with a very small smile. “You could use that. As my name.”   
  
“Sebastian,” Chris said, and the smile grew. “I like it. Your name.”   
  
“I like you saying my name,” Sebastian said, “it sounds like mine, when you say it,” and kissed him, the two of them standing in the middle of a dirt lane and miles of shaggy forest, the future teeming with possibilities, with magic all around.


End file.
